TY - JOUR
T1 - Antecedents of News Avoidance
T2 - Competing Effects of Political Interest, News Overload, Trust in News Media, and “News Finds Me” Perception
AU - Goyanes, Manuel
AU - Ardèvol-Abreu, Alberto
AU - Gil de Zúñiga, Homero
N1 - Funding Information:
The second author is funded by the “Viera y Clavijo” Program from the Agencia Canaria de Investigación, Innovación y Sociedad de la Información and the Universidad de La Laguna. The authors are grateful to all members of the Media Innovation Lab (University of Vienna) for their help with the data collection for this study.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - Recent changes in the media environment make it easier than ever for people to actively shape their news repertoires according to their habits, needs, and preferences. As convenient as these practices seem, they may favor the development of misperceptions such as “news finds me” perception (NFM) and make it easier for some people to disconnect from news and political content. Building on the conceptualization of news avoidance as a general disposition and its consequential behaviors, this study jointly examines key individual-level predispositions that may motivate intentional news avoidance. Based on a two-wave survey collected in the United States, our results largely corroborate previous work showing the association of political interest, news overload, and trust in professional news with news avoidance, and stress the importance of including the NFM in the theoretical and empirical modelling of news avoidance. Our analyses also suggest that the linkages between these individual-level antecedents and news avoidance are contingent upon the design and robustness of the empirical tests, with NFM yielding the most consistent association across models.
AB - Recent changes in the media environment make it easier than ever for people to actively shape their news repertoires according to their habits, needs, and preferences. As convenient as these practices seem, they may favor the development of misperceptions such as “news finds me” perception (NFM) and make it easier for some people to disconnect from news and political content. Building on the conceptualization of news avoidance as a general disposition and its consequential behaviors, this study jointly examines key individual-level predispositions that may motivate intentional news avoidance. Based on a two-wave survey collected in the United States, our results largely corroborate previous work showing the association of political interest, news overload, and trust in professional news with news avoidance, and stress the importance of including the NFM in the theoretical and empirical modelling of news avoidance. Our analyses also suggest that the linkages between these individual-level antecedents and news avoidance are contingent upon the design and robustness of the empirical tests, with NFM yielding the most consistent association across models.
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U2 - 10.1080/21670811.2021.1990097
DO - 10.1080/21670811.2021.1990097
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85118256050
SN - 2167-0811
VL - 11
SP - 1
EP - 18
JO - Digital Journalism
JF - Digital Journalism
IS - 1
ER -